“Just talk to any Chinese who lived through that time,” a middle-aged man whose father spent nearly 20 years in a labor camp for “practicing capitalism” tells the radio reporter Rob Schmitz, in “Street of Eternal Happiness,” his new book about some of the ordinary people he encounters in his Shanghai neighborhood. “We all have the same stories.”

The man means to dismiss the indignities families like his suffered during the Mao era, but what he says is also true of the past decade. Anybody who has read about the frothy excess and casual injustice of contemporary China will certainly recognize the sympathetic portraits that Schmitz paints of struggle and success along the bustling, leafy stretch of road where he lives, in the former French Concession in Shanghai.

It has long been de rigueur for foreign correspondents to expand their ­dispatches into book form to better document the amusing and bewildering society around them. Although this combination of note-dumping and extracurricular reporting can lead to the recapitulation of some common themes, even a sense of familiarity wouldn’t make the four in-depth profiles Schmitz weaves ­together — ­fashioned out of a wider series he reported for American Public Media’s “Marketplace” — any less poignant or enjoyable. Books by John Pomfret and Leslie Chang may offer more distinctive or insightful introductions to the dislocation caused by China’s rapid development, but Schmitz’s eye for scenes and ear for dialogue give an immediacy to his stories that more expository works often lack.

Changle Lu, loosely translated as Street of Eternal Happiness, is a rich environment to mine for narrative in the heart of China’s most populous city. A two-mile thoroughfare lined with shops and restaurants frequented by expats and locals alike, it also leads to a few remaining residential alleyways called longtang, as well as the sprawling hotel where President Richard Nixon signed the Shanghai Communiqué in 1972.

Looking past other landmarks, including a popular bookstore serving gelato, Schmitz finds a migrant worker in her second act as flower shop owner, a bickering old couple who are mired in get-rich-quick schemes, a struggling restaurateur who sells accordions on the side and indignant victims of land expropriation who squat on the lot where their homes once stood.

Schmitz — who in 2012 exposed the fabrications in Mike Daisey’s one-man show, about Chinese plants assembling Apple products — manages to stake out his subjects long enough to gain entrance to their private worlds. The payoff comes when he follows them away from the title’s street to meaningful places of their choosing: a Buddhist retreat, an underground church, a countryside wedding. He even tracks down the family of a former Changle Lu resident after being handed a cache of his prison letters, a task that takes Schmitz all the way to New York, where the son has settled.

But aside from some potted history and interviews with two prominent survivors of labor camps, Schmitz eschews the kind of contextual material that would have given the book more heft. I was also hoping he would delve even further into a promising theme: the surreal naïveté of China’s older generation.

Schmitz’s account of the aging Auntie Fu, who risks $50,000 in life savings on obvious swindles, captures the cost of the irrational exuberance still gripping the country. Having experienced decades of stagnation before China’s dramatic economic growth, these seniors bargain hard over vegetables but are disarmed by the thrill of frenetic development. How countless “investors” have been bilked out of billions would be a worthy topic for a book — perhaps Schmitz’s next one.